First, at a high level, CIRP estimates that 20.5 million Kindles — e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets combined — are currently in use in the U.S., and that 40 percent of Amazon.com’s customers own one of the devices.

CIRP conducted a survey of 300 Amazon.com customers over the three months leading up to Nov. 15 and found, perhaps not all that surprisingly, that people who own Kindles spend more on Amazon than those who don’t. But the size of the disparity is pretty astounding. Based on its research and analysis, CIRP estimates that Kindle owners spend $1,233 per year on Amazon compared to $790 per year for Amazon shoppers who don’t own one of the company’s e-readers or tablets.

So what should I do next time I see a story about market share? See whether it has the supporting numbers you need: the total size of the market, and what it tells us about the installed base. And what, if anything, it tells you about what’s happening in the wider market. Samsung’s colossal market share in smartphones and mobile phones, for instance, is reflected in installed base figures – and also in its profits and heft in the business world. Sometimes the numbers are useful. But on their own? Not really.

To me, the comparison that is most interesting is to that of my MacBook Air. In exactly three years, Apple has produced an iPad that outperforms a then-brand-new MacBook. Three years is a decent chunk of time in this industry, and the MacBook Air has made great strides since then, but this (a brand-new iPad Air versus a late 2010 MacBook Air) is a credible comparison. In many ways the iPad Air is not just the superior device, but clearly so — it has a retina display, the MacBook Air does not; it gets 10 hours of battery life, the MacBook Air was advertised at just 5 hours back then[..]

Amazon’s new line of Kindle Fire HDX tablets will let Prime Instant Video users* download some movies and TV shows to their devices, for free, for up to 30 days, so they can watch without an Internet connection. Once they start watching a particular title, they’ll have 48 hours to finish.
That’s a feature no other U.S. subscription-streaming service currently offers. And it might prove very handy for travelers, or anyone else who wants to watch something on a laptop or tablet but doesn’t have access to good broadband.

So far so good; the automotive metaphor seems to have some value for a discussion of tablets. But does this similarity between the automotive industry and the tablet computing market mean that the hardware space is destined to look like the automotive industry? That is, will it break into sub-markets (with “semi-nonsubstitutable” products) in which (for instance) “Sub-Compact Category Captures Almost 5% of Industry Sales” is a key headline? Following an automotive industry pattern, will tablets devolve into micro-niche categories instead of today’s discrete form factors?

The short answer is yes, the tablet market continues to fragment into differentiated niches. We’re undergoing a period of great experimentation in computing – everything from myriad tablet types to furniture PCs to wearable computing devices that run on the same platforms.

Amazon has expanded its X-Ray for movies feature, which enables Kindle users to tap on an actor or actress and discover which films they’ve starred in, by adding support for TV shows today.

The service, which uses the popular IMDB database, now supports some of the most popular shows available on Amazon Instant Video; Justified, Downton Abbey, The West Wing, Sons of Anarchy, Falling Skies, American Horror Story, Grey’s Anatomy, Doctor Who, The Walking Dead, Lost, Glee, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones.

The feature is exclusive to the Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD and Amazon Instant Video app for Wii U. It follows an iOS version of X-Ray for Books, a similar feature focused on novels and textbooks, that was launched in December last year.

[Evernote-CTO Dave Engberg] also said that Evernote is seeing increasing usage of its Windows Phone app – and more important, that people on that platform use it quite often and buy extra services. „The average revenue per user is more than it is for Android.“ He called Windows Phone revenue „modest, but worth the effort“ and said it was „solidly in third place“ – ahead of BlackBerry.

But Engberg does not recommend trying to reach these smaller platforms with a cross-platform development strategy. „If you build a kind-of-OK HTML5 app for a mobile device, you’ll be number nine“ in the various app store lists for your category. Meanwhile, the top two apps will get almost all the downloads.

„It’s not worth doing it halfway,“ he insisted. „There’s no benefit of putting half effort into it.“

Most importantly, Ubuntu is so lightweight that – by the time Ubuntu 14.04 rolls around – it’ll be able to use the same code across all four form factors, with the same security features, user profiles and UI fundamentals.

Since the OS will be a constant, a smartphone-oriented app will work on an Ubuntu tablet or any other Ubuntu device without having to be ported or even tweaked. (Although devs will still have the option of adding functionality or UI elements that are specific to one category of device, or that only wake up when a device is docked – like when a tablet is attached to a keyboard or when a phone is hooked up to a bigger display.)

This is very different to what Windows offers, for example, with its separate WP8, RT and Windows 8 versions. In fact, Mark Shuttleworth claims to have "cracked this one in a way that has eluded Microsoft," not least because Ubuntu’s approach means that smartphone- and tablet-sized apps can run side-by-side on the same device in split screen mode.

The U.S. is Amazon’s first and main market for the Kindle Fire, with Amazon only starting to roll out the tablets to other markets towards the end of 2012 (first in the UK market), around a year after launching in the U.S.

That means that some 89% of Amazon’s tablets “live in America, with most of the rest in Great Britain,” writes Localytics’ Daniel Ruby. “After those two, no other country has even one percent of worldwide Kindle Fires.”

In the rest of the world, however, the Android tablet game is Samsung’s to lose. Ruby tells me that the Korean device maker’s Galaxy line accounts for 76% of all Android tablet usage across non-U.S. markets. Nexus 7 came in second at 15%, and Kindle Fire’s global share is just 9%.

Localytics notes that if Amazon manages to work out its international distribution, then “their U.S.